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[Industry Thread] Read the OP, or you'll see more red than 38 Studios.

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The main thing that caused Cata to leak subs was how unforgivingly hard the first heroic dungeons and raid tier was. They basically scared away a huge amount of their playerbase by making things too hard and complicated up front such that after headbutting things for a few weeks they just said screw it and quit. This concept goes hand-in-hand with our conversation about controllers earlier and how if you engage people and ease them into things you'll retain more users than if you slam it down in front of them and tell them "too bad" when they don't get it.

"Bah, I'll show them, trying to casualise my WOW?"

Making the new content easier would've been a bit of a double-edged sword too though, I'm pretty sure some of the older players would've reacted with vitriol to that and simply packed their bags and left.

I think a bunch of people left after Cata for their own separate reasons. Some of the new people left because it was too hard, some of the old guard left because they thought the content had "devalued" into a "casual" binary Click->Get Shiny, some didn't feel like following the lore anymore and I'm pretty sure some people were simply sucked into other MMOs or regular blockbuster games. I'm not sure they could've done much to stave off the drop in players, except for some general polishing and pacing smoothing here and there. The core gameplay, which a lot of people feel is getting too stale, isn't something they can change up all that much.

I doubt WoW will just "go away", it'll probably be around for a good few more years... However, by now it's becoming increasingly evident that the playerbase is going to shrink and thus the money the game generates will continue to diminish by the year. Blizzard's gonna need something to replace that source of revenue soon, so... WoW 2 in a few years? Or perhaps they're simply banking on Diablo 3's RMAH to fill that profithole in time.

The main thing that caused Cata to leak subs was how unforgivingly hard the first heroic dungeons and raid tier was. They basically scared away a huge amount of their playerbase by making things too hard and complicated up front such that after headbutting things for a few weeks they just said screw it and quit. This concept goes hand-in-hand with our conversation about controllers earlier and how if you engage people and ease them into things you'll retain more users than if you slam it down in front of them and tell them "too bad" when they don't get it.

It didn't help that it was coming off of Wrath of the Lich King, which made huge strides in accessibility and ease of play for the majority of the game's players, which lead to the game being at its peak in subs.

If you ever hear or see an MMO dev start talking about wanting to make things "meaningful" again, you'll probably want to run for the hills.

The main thing that caused Cata to leak subs was how unforgivingly hard the first heroic dungeons and raid tier was. They basically scared away a huge amount of their playerbase by making things too hard and complicated up front such that after headbutting things for a few weeks they just said screw it and quit. This concept goes hand-in-hand with our conversation about controllers earlier and how if you engage people and ease them into things you'll retain more users than if you slam it down in front of them and tell them "too bad" when they don't get it.

"Bah, I'll show them, trying to casualise my WOW?"

Making the new content easier would've been a bit of a double-edged sword too though, I'm pretty sure some of the older players would've reacted with vitriol to that and simply packed their bags and left.

I think a bunch of people left after Cata for their own separate reasons. Some of the new people left because it was too hard, some of the old guard left because they thought the content had "devalued" into a "casual" binary Click->Get Shiny, some didn't feel like following the lore anymore and I'm pretty sure some people were simply sucked into other MMOs or regular blockbuster games. I'm not sure they could've done much to stave off the drop in players, except for some general polishing and pacing smoothing here and there. The core gameplay, which a lot of people feel is getting too stale, isn't something they can change up all that much.

I doubt WoW will just "go away", it'll probably be around for a good few more years... However, by now it's becoming increasingly evident that the playerbase is going to shrink and thus the money the game generates will continue to diminish by the year. Blizzard's gonna need something to replace that source of revenue soon, so... WoW 2 in a few years? Or perhaps they're simply banking on Diablo 3's RMAH to fill that profithole in time.

I think they have maybe just hit the natural end of the game. Just general fatigue with the design among the userbase. People were finally getting wow-ed out.

Cata just didn't feel ... new the way the other expansions did. They'd finally got the game where they really liked it by the end of WOTLK and so it just felt like the same shit over again. Combine that with going back to the original continents and it just felt tired and the same. Even the new expansion isn't drastically shaking up the core design anymore.

I think Blizzard are thinking alot of the same shit since they are trying hard to push the "discover new continents of adventure" thing with Panda-time expansion.

The drastic difficulty change between face-rolling endgame WOTLK and getting stomped in Cata probably didn't help either, but I think it's just overall fatigue.

I don't think they'll ever hit their peak again, but I could see Pandas stopping the hemorrhaging and maybe keep it to a slow steady trickle or maybe, maybe, some eventually plateauing.

The main thing that caused Cata to leak subs was how unforgivingly hard the first heroic dungeons and raid tier was. They basically scared away a huge amount of their playerbase by making things too hard and complicated up front such that after headbutting things for a few weeks they just said screw it and quit. This concept goes hand-in-hand with our conversation about controllers earlier and how if you engage people and ease them into things you'll retain more users than if you slam it down in front of them and tell them "too bad" when they don't get it.

It didn't help that it was coming off of Wrath of the Lich King, which made huge strides in accessibility and ease of play for the majority of the game's players, which lead to the game being at its peak in subs.

If you ever hear or see an MMO dev start talking about wanting to make things "meaningful" again, you'll probably want to run for the hills.

Also, never underestimate "God, I've been playing for HOW long?" Still have an account, will probably buy MoP at some point--I mean it's not like it's not FUN--it's just I have a BUNCH of other games to play that I haven't been playing for ages and ages. I bet I'm not the only one.

The main thing that caused Cata to leak subs was how unforgivingly hard the first heroic dungeons and raid tier was. They basically scared away a huge amount of their playerbase by making things too hard and complicated up front such that after headbutting things for a few weeks they just said screw it and quit. This concept goes hand-in-hand with our conversation about controllers earlier and how if you engage people and ease them into things you'll retain more users than if you slam it down in front of them and tell them "too bad" when they don't get it.

"Bah, I'll show them, trying to casualise my WOW?"

Making the new content easier would've been a bit of a double-edged sword too though, I'm pretty sure some of the older players would've reacted with vitriol to that and simply packed their bags and left.

I think a bunch of people left after Cata for their own separate reasons. Some of the new people left because it was too hard, some of the old guard left because they thought the content had "devalued" into a "casual" binary Click->Get Shiny, some didn't feel like following the lore anymore and I'm pretty sure some people were simply sucked into other MMOs or regular blockbuster games. I'm not sure they could've done much to stave off the drop in players, except for some general polishing and pacing smoothing here and there. The core gameplay, which a lot of people feel is getting too stale, isn't something they can change up all that much.

I doubt WoW will just "go away", it'll probably be around for a good few more years... However, by now it's becoming increasingly evident that the playerbase is going to shrink and thus the money the game generates will continue to diminish by the year. Blizzard's gonna need something to replace that source of revenue soon, so... WoW 2 in a few years? Or perhaps they're simply banking on Diablo 3's RMAH to fill that profithole in time.

I think they have maybe just hit the natural end of the game. Just general fatigue with the design among the userbase. People were finally getting wow-ed out.

Cata just didn't feel ... new the way the other expansions did. They'd finally got the game where they really liked it by the end of WOTLK and so it just felt like the same shit over again. Combine that with going back to the original continents and it just felt tired and the same. Even the new expansion isn't drastically shaking up the core design anymore.

I think Blizzard are thinking alot of the same shit since they are trying hard to push the "discover new continents of adventure" thing with Panda-time expansion.

The drastic difficulty change between face-rolling endgame WOTLK and getting stomped in Cata probably didn't help either, but I think it's just overall fatigue.

I don't think they'll ever hit their peak again, but I could see Pandas stopping the hemorrhaging and maybe keep it to a slow steady trickle or maybe, maybe, some eventually plateauing.

I do believe that a lot of of subscribers are generally waiting for either Blizzard's next MMO or the next big leap in MMO's. It feels very similar to how Everquest panned out.

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Picking the exact same 8 RGB combinations out of 16 million choices? That's pretty damning stuff; the odds on that happening naturally would be, well, pretty damn rare. As in a 1-in-X chance, where X is some number with a shitload of zeroes after it.

1 in 4.2949597798126342614967914836131e+57 (that's 4.2949597798126342614967914836131 * 10X, where X is 57 zeroes). It's more likely that every single person in the United States would get struck by lightning all in the same day. Alphabetically.

Simultaneously Temple Run shows exactly why iOS games are (IMHO) terrible: It's on-par with a flash game you found on the internet around the turn of the century.

Eh, you might be able to make a case that most of the best selling iOS games are shallow but if you actually look, there's plenty of high quality games to enjoy there. Just in the past few weeks, I've been enjoying Fieldrunners 2 (quite possibly the best tower defense game of all time), Ghost Trick (admittedly a DS port, but the iPad version is both cheaper and looks better), Shellrazer and more. And that all cost me less than $15 (with most of that being Ghost Trick).

Smartphone & tablet gaming doesn't mean Nintendo is doomed (if they ever actually become doomed, it'll be a gradually event that will take place over a decade or more, since they have a LOT of money saved up as well as many strong IPs) but if you wave it away with a "It's all just cheap flash game knockoffs" you're being just as ignorant as everyone who said that the Wii didn't have any good games in its library. It's already so much more than that and it will just keep getting better and better.

I don't see WoW coming back, though it's decline will surely be slow and steady, and if they invest enough they can get 5 years of tail at over 2M out of it. (They may need to sacrifice some of that ridicilous ~80% profit margin). People are invested not just in a game sense, but in a social / selfworth sense in many cases.

Looking at that chart, it's become clear that WoW is a true anomaly: About 10 times the sustained numbers as any other, and many of the 'big' MMO launches fail to even register on the chart due to it's 1M subscriber entry point. CoH, EQ, LoTRO, RIFT, TERA, STO and many others, while not all unsuccesful per se, the 'hotbar mmo' was only a true moneyprinter in a single instance.

Personally, I'm not sad to see them go. The core design just seems very limited at this point, with the base game being really easy (Press 1 button per / 1.5 seconds, sometimes don't stand in fire) where challenge is only really introduced by really tight timers or quick movement requirements multiplied by large groups and long fights so that mistakes are more plentiful.

who was it that said people were playing the game wrong and it all made complete sense? ubisoft?

I think you're talking about Brutal Legend, where the advertising made people expect the game to be played one way but the actual way was different and so when they complained that playing it the expected way didn't work they were told that they were doing it wrong.

On the skin tone thing, I checked the colors in that and not only do the RGB values not match up with the dots above them, the colors for Sims vs Ville are different. Either they fucked up when getting the RGB colors and/or making the image so they retained their actual RGB values or EA is lying about them having identical RGB values in the first place. I'm not going to go on Facebook and find the actual color selection things right now to verify though.

who was it that said people were playing the game wrong and it all made complete sense? ubisoft?

I think you're talking about Brutal Legend, where the advertising made people expect the game to be played one way but the actual way was different and so when they complained that playing it the expected way didn't work they were told that they were doing it wrong.

On the skin tone thing, I checked the colors in that and not only do the RGB values not match up with the dots above them, the colors for Sims vs Ville are different. Either they fucked up when getting the RGB colors and/or making the image so they retained their actual RGB values or EA is lying about them having identical RGB values in the first place. I'm not going to go on Facebook and find the actual color selection things right now to verify though.

To be honest, my bet is that Zynga raced over to change those values slightly when they got caught. It wouldn't be hard, and a couple microscopic nudges wouldn't even be noticeable to the players.

Regardless, EA needs to hammer Zynga hard. Wish real criminal charges would be brought up here; no telling how many livelihoods Zynga has stolen for their own use.

Yes but I believe this is the first time that a major company with serious legal resources at their disposal has called them on it. Most of the time, they've been stealing from smaller indie companies that don't have much recourse to them.

In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of another western-released MMO with a monthly fee at this point, besides WoW of course.

The Secret World (because it just came out), Rift (I'm sure it will be soon), Vanguard, Meridian 59 (olol), Asheron's Call (Turbine can't get the engine to work with an F2P model)... I think that's it.

Edit: Looks like Vanguard goes F2P next week, and M59 went there a couple years ago. Huh.

In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of another western-released MMO with a monthly fee at this point, besides WoW of course.

The Secret World (because it just came out), Rift (I'm sure it will be soon), Vanguard, Meridian 59 (olol), Asheron's Call (Turbine can't get the engine to work with an F2P model)... I think that's it.

Edit: Looks like Vanguard goes F2P next week, and M59 went there a couple years ago. Huh.

That's what you get for not constantly keeping up to date on the news of a sixteen year old game!

it doesn't take that much money to run a few servers for the couple thousand players still around. I doubt it makes them much money, but SOE probably just runs it off the same pool of hardware they have for EQ,EQ2,DCU,Planetside, etc.

In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of another western-released MMO with a monthly fee at this point, besides WoW of course.

The Secret World (because it just came out), Rift (I'm sure it will be soon), Vanguard, Meridian 59 (olol), Asheron's Call (Turbine can't get the engine to work with an F2P model)... I think that's it.

Edit: Looks like Vanguard goes F2P next week, and M59 went there a couple years ago. Huh.

EVE and TERA still have them as well. Though they both have that 'Game time buyable with in game money from other characters' bit going on.

Well, yeah. But you were speaking about the actual quality of the library before, not "hype".

Mmm, not necessarily individual game quality as in whether it's good or bad, but more just how nobody wants what they're offering because Sony, for the most part, is repeating the exact same mistakes it made with the PSP. Instead of creating a uniquely hand held experience like Nintendo is, they're instead just trying to create a miniature home console with a lot of the same shit you can already play on the PS3/360 in bigger HD'o'vision and with more features. Save for series die hards, stuff like Uncharted Vita isn't really going to make any waves with most people.

In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of another western-released MMO with a monthly fee at this point, besides WoW of course.

The Secret World (because it just came out), Rift (I'm sure it will be soon), Vanguard, Meridian 59 (olol), Asheron's Call (Turbine can't get the engine to work with an F2P model)... I think that's it.

Edit: Looks like Vanguard goes F2P next week, and M59 went there a couple years ago. Huh.

Asheron's Call F2P would be... interesting. Given at peak there are around 250 players on each server, that would definitely breath life into it. I'd rather see them do an Asheron's Call 1.5 expansion pack that would replace the engine outright, though.

Well, yeah. But you were speaking about the actual quality of the library before, not "hype".

Mmm, not necessarily individual game quality as in whether it's good or bad, but more just how nobody wants what they're offering because Sony, for the most part, is repeating the exact same mistakes it made with the PSP. Instead of creating a uniquely hand held experience like Nintendo is, they're instead just trying to create a miniature home console with a lot of the same shit you can already play on the PS3/360 in bigger HD'o'vision and with more features. Save for series die hards, stuff like Uncharted Vita isn't really going to make any waves with most people.

Apologies if my initial wording sucked.

This is close enough to true. They have been making offshoots of already established franchises to try to sell the system.

On the other hand, some of the distinctly best games have been mostly just Vita outings. Such as the new Katamari and Gravity Rush. They really should concentrate more on games like this, that take a creative approach to games. Katamari in particular is really fun in how you can warp the katamari with the touch controls.

Also they have a few Augmented Reality games that are really fun. Like this tabletop tanks game. Use little AR cards to setup arena parameters and put books and boxes around as obstacles. It's nifty and incredibly creative. I think 3DS has a couple of similarish games, but they really are cool things to do with handhelds.

Yeah, the really memorable stuff on the PSP were games like Patapon. I loved the shit out of that game and it wasn't available anywhere else. Unfortunately most of the releases were just retreads of shit I had already played. It's hard to imagine that Sony didn't think this through at all and are making the exact same bad calls all over again with the Vita and yet: herewegoagain.jpg. It's like they're not even paying attention to the world around them and live exclusively in Sonyland.

"We are committed to creating the most fun, innovative, social and engaging games in every major genre that our players enjoy. The Ville is the newest game in our 'ville' franchise – it builds on every major innovation from our existing invest-and-express games dating back to YoVille and continuing through CityVille and CastleVille, and introduces a number of new social features and game mechanics not seen in social games today. It's unfortunate that EA thought that this was an appropriate response to our game, and clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles. It's also ironic that EA brings this suit shortly after launching SimCity Social which bears an uncanny resemblance to Zynga's CityVille game. Nonetheless, we plan to defend our rights to the fullest extent possible and intend to win with players."

The layers here are incredible. First, I don't think Mr. Davis knows what 'innovation' actually means. Second, his defense about Sim City Social copying CityVille is hysterical. "A game we copied from EA got copied, therefore, EA is wrong."

But the biggest thing is that Zynga is going to fight this issue in court. They're going to lose, and I hope that when they extend a settlement deal EA declines and goes for the whole lawsuit. Zynga is crashing and burning fast and this isn't going to help them at all.